Grandfather Was Inspiration for Watergate Attorney General

In the summer of 1972, as the class of '47 celebrated its 25th reunion, Richard G. Kleindienst '47 was a busy man.

As deputy attorney general of the United States, Kleindienst was poised to become the nation's next attorney general and was quickly becoming disturbed by the evolving story of a botched robbery at the Democratic National Committee.

Today, Kleindienst lives his life at a slower pace.

Semi-retired and holding the upper hand in a battle against lung cancer, he has returned to the northern Arizona mountains where he was born and raised.

Thousands of miles away from the ambitious presidential aides and nosy reporters of the nation's capital, he now spends his time as legal counsel for Hassayampa, a high-altitude residential development recently built around a signature golf course that is dotted with Ponderossa pines.

Kleindienst's stalwart conservative ideals, which landed him in the Nixon administration, are rooted in a background that begins with his grandfather.

In his memoir, Justice: the Memoirs, of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst (1985), Kleindienst writes that, "Granddad...brought to Arizona the deep conviction that the preservation of freedom in America depended solely upon the Republican Party."

Kleindiest spent the first 25 years of his life after Harvard fighting for these ideals. And when he reached the attorney general's office at age 49, it would have seemed to be the ultimate tribute to his work.

But on June 17, 1972, five days after he was sworn in, the Watergate break-in was discovered and the World War II veteran began to spending the bulk of his time dealing with a morass of emerging cover-ups.

Asked if he was disappointed to have reached the apex of his career and found himself forced to step down, Kleindienst laughs and is terse.

"Of course," he said in a recent interview. "I was deeply disappointed and I still am."

Kleindienst says that as deputy attorney general, his initial Nixon administration appointment,he had a promising agenda of two or three programs that were quickly put on the back-burner.

"With Watergate," he says, "those things just went down the river."

A consummate patriot, however, Kleindienst is convinced that the Watergate ordeal reflects positively upon American democracy.

"In my opinion the Constitution was impeccable during the whole process," Kleindienst says.

Splitting With Harvard

In 1937, as she lay dying from an infection caused by an operation, infection caused by an operation, Kleindienst's mother left him with one goal.

"Hitch your wagon to a star, Dickie, and if possible, someday try to go to Harvard,'" Kleindienst recalls her saying.

When Kleindienst returned to the U.S. after two and a half years with the 15th Air Force in Italy, he jumped at the opportunity to study at the nation's oldest university through the help of the G.I. bill.

Today Kleindienst has fond memories of his days in the ivory tower studying with then-chair of the economics department Harold H. Burbank and presiding over a sparsely numbered conservative debate team.

"All the frustrations of soldiering and war and all the suppressed desires to be involved in politics were relived at Harvard," Kleindienst writes in his biography.

But despite his experiences, coupled with a wife and son who both spent spent their college years in Cambridge, Kleindienst did not attend his class' 1972 reunion and does not plan to attend this year's festivities.

Kleindienst says that events during the Vietnam War "left a bad taste" in his mouth.

Kleindienst says that he was asked by President Nathan M. Pusey '28 to speak at the University's Commencement exercises, in 1972.

Although Kleindienst was opposed to the Vietnam War, the Harvard Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) protested his involvement with the controversy through the Nixon administration.

As a result, Kleindienst says he was "disinvited" from his speaking engagement.

Although he says he is not bitter about its actions, he insists that Harvard should not have made such a biased political decision.

"You can't politicize a great university," he says. "I don't think that it is consistent with the traditions of a great liberal university."

A Political Life

Throughout his political career, Kleindienst says he maintained a commitment to the ideals that were instilled in him by his grandfather.

Senator Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.) began to cultivate Kleindienst and served as a mentor for his ideals early in his career.

Recounting his first experience with Goldwater's political style, Kleindienst tells of the Senator's actions during a winter in the midst of the Depression when the sheep that sustained Navajos on an Indian reservation not far from his Winslow, Ariz., home began to die in the cold.

Kleindienst was impressed that Goldwater, who he thought of as "a rich guy in Phoenix," had the heart to fly hay into the reservation in order to feed the dying sheep.

"I began to imagine the impact he would have upon his country," Kleindienst writes.

Goldwater and Kleindienst went on to establish a close personal relationship in working together in the Arizona Republican Party.

During his 1964 run for the presidency,m the former senator appointed Kleindienst national director of field operations for Goldwater's campaign. When Kleindienst was only 33, Goldwater appointed him chair of the Arizona Republican Party.

Labeling Goldwater "John the Baptist of the Republican Party," Kleindienst says that the notorious right-winger is at the foundation of the modern Republican Party's ideology.

Kleindienst also says that Goldwater was largely responsible for getting him to the attorney general's office.

"I may be the only person to have attained the high position of attorney general of the United States for no other reason than my involvement in the organizational politics of the organizational politics of the Republican Party," Kleindienst writes.

Working in Washington at a time when, he says, he found many of his colleague working with questionable motives, Kleindienst maintained his commitment to the ideals generated in his Arizona upbringing.

Even as the pieces of the Watergate puzzle began to fit together, Kleindienst kept his focus.

After several of the burglars were arrested, G. Gordon Liddy--later indicted in the case--asked the attorney general to use his position to get the group out of jail.

In a telephone conversation that he recalls having with one of his deputies, Kleindienst was curt.

"I don't know what this is all about, but those persons arrested last night are to be treated just like anyone else," Kleindienst said in 1972.

But after Nixon won a second term in November 1972, events began to escalate.

It gradually became clear to Kleindienst that even John Mitchell, his predecessor and close friend who left the Justice Department for the Nixon campaign in 1972, was involved in the cover-up.

In April 1963, it became too much.

"It got to the point where I just had to quit and recuse myself of anything to do with Watergate," Kleindienst says.

Today, although he says he is disappointed by what he has to show for the more fast-paced days of his life, he remains optimistic.

He argues that a strong commitment to personal values can help avoid the type of disaster that beset the Nixon administration.

"When a presidential counselor has the courage to say, 'Mr. President, you are wrong,' Watergate will not occur," he writes.

"I don't particularly care for Mr. Clinton," he says, but adds: "Any of the errors and omission of which he has been accused do not compare with Watergate.... Watergate involved the obstruction of justice."

--Amber L. Ramage contributed to the reporting of this article.